Did a 1912 Newspaper Article That Went Viral On Social Media Predict Global Warming?

By TruePublica: A Tweet started doing the rounds recently and pretty much went viral that somehow did not seem right. So we checked it out. You may have seen this a couple of years ago as that was when it first emerged. The claim is that a newspaper clipping from 1912 anticipated the global warming potential of burning coal and as it turns out – is authentic and consistent with the history of climate science. And you are about to read, similar claims were made even earlier, in fact, much earlier. It appears that scientists well over 150 years ago had a strong suspicion that burning fossil fuels was not going to end well.

The viral tweet emanated from a Facebook page “Sustainable Business Network NZ” who posted a photograph of a clipping from the 14 August 1912 edition of the Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette that included a brief item headlined “Coal Consumption Affecting Climate.” It went on to say rather accurately:

The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.

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This article’s authenticity is supported by the fact it can be found in the digital archives of the National Library of New Zealand.

The Fact-Checker Snopes went on to say that – “Further attesting to its authenticity (and perhaps its role as a bit of stock news used to fill space) is that an identical story had appeared in an Australian newspaper a month prior, in the 17 July 1912, issue of The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal, as found in the digital archives of the National Library of Australia.”

An even deeper dive reveals that the text of this news item has its origins in the March 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics, where it appeared as a caption in an article titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future”:

Some online commenters expressed scepticism over the notion that such a clear understanding of the mechanisms relating to greenhouse gases existed in 1912, or that anyone back then would have suggested humans could play a role in altering their concentration. In fact, the timing of these news clips is also consistent with the historical record.

The first person to use the term “greenhouse gases” was a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In a paper published that year, he made an early calculation of how much warmer the Earth was thanks to the energy-trapping nature of some of the gases in the atmosphere. Even at this early stage, he understood that humans had the potential to play a significant role in changing the concentration of at least one of those gases, carbon dioxide (carbonic acid back then):

“The world’s present production of coal reaches in round numbers 500 millions of tons per annum, or 1 ton per km of earth’s surface. Transformed into carbonic acid, this quantity would correspond to about a thousandth part of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere.”

Though he didn’t explicitly say in that paper that human activity could warm the planet, Arrhenius would go on to make that argument in later works. A 2008 tribute to Arrhenius published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences stated that his ideas about coal and climate were popular and well known in his day but fell out of favour for a while after his death in 1927:

While Arrhenius’ prediction [of warming] received great public interest, this typically waned in time but was revived as an important global mechanism by the great atmospheric physicist Carl Gustaf Rossby who initiated atmospheric CO2 measurements in Sweden in the 1950s.

In this sense, the content and date of the newspaper clips in question are consistent with both what was known to scientists about greenhouse gases then and what the general public was interested in at the time.

As it turns out, we can go back even further than this.

Eunice Newton Foote studied the warming effect of the sun, including how this warming was increased by the presence of carbonic acid gas (carbon dioxide) and suggested that the surface of an Earth whose atmosphere was rich in this gas would have a higher temperature. Her work was presented by Prof. Joseph Henry at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in August 1856 and published as a brief note, but scientists failed to take notice. Foote wrote:

The highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas. … An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action, as well as from increased weight, must have necessarily resulted.

Climate change is nothing new. Our knowledge of it isn’t either – but there’s money and therefore considerable power in denying the effect it has on the world. In saying that – back then in the 1800s and 1900s a reliable source of energy was required to drive the world economy. It drove wealth and led millions out of poverty. Today, we have alternative options. It’s time for the climate science denial business, which is huge to accept the very real threat it presents to humans as a species.

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